Marine Makes Sure Event Is Ready to Fly : Air show: Lt. Col. Eric Jones has spent the past year coordinating the upcoming El Toro production.

Lt. Col. Eric Jones likes to joke about inviting 800,000 of his closest friends over for the weekend.

But Jones knows he better be ready when his guests begin to arrive Saturday morning at the front gate of the El Toro Marine Corps Air Station.

His final checklist includes such things as 420 portable toilets, 145 sinks, 250,000 hot dogs, 120,000 pounds of ice, 450 military police officers for traffic and crowd control, dozens of Navy doctors to take care of minor and major injuries, volunteers to match up hundreds of lost children with their worried parents, trucks to carry away 25 tons of garbage each day, and a $15,000 insurance premium in case the show is rained out.

The 43-year-old career Marine is this year’s coordinator for the El Toro Air Show, one of the largest such two-day events in the nation.

Getting ready for the show was not easy. Jones, his boss, Col. John Dennis, and six other ranking officers and a civilian have spent the past year in endless meetings and on endless telephone calls arranging for food, drink and entertainment for a crowd that could reach a million for the free event Saturday and Sunday.

“I can’t order people to put on a great air show,” Jones said. “But I knew last September when I saw the people I was working with that this show would be a success. A key is organization and communication. Put good people in the right job, and those people will know what they are supposed to be doing.”

This year’s air show, called “A Salute to Teamwork,” is probably the biggest production Jones will ever put together. It features the Navy’s Blue Angels, a Marine air demonstration, flybys of the AV-8B Harrier and the F-16, stunt pilots and a host of civilian aerobatic flight teams to dazzle the crowd from above. On the ground, there will be about 80 military aircraft on display, featuring the futuristic F-117 stealth fighter.

The mammoth job of coordinating the air show changes hands at El Toro from year to year. Jones hesitated momentarily when asked why he thought that he was qualified to put together what is considered the largest military air show in the world.

He said his more than 20 years in the Marine Corps and two jobs as a commanding officer taught him how to get things done. “It is a task and something I will succeed at with the help of others . . . ,” he said. “Actually, this is pretty easy, at least they’re not shooting at me.”

The show often is referred to as the Paris Air Show of the West and is a “military Disneyland” for aviation buffs who come to see the supersonic jet fighters and such large military transports as the C-5a Galaxy.

Last year, in the euphoric aftermath of the Persian Gulf War, the El Toro Air Show attracted 1.2 million people. It was the largest crowd in the history of the air show which was launched in 1950, when Harry S. Truman was President and the air station was surrounded by bean fields and orange groves.

“The main reason for the show is to demonstrate what the Navy and Marine Corps air-ground team does, and it shows the public what the Marines, Navy and Air Force has to offer,” Jones said. At the same time, he said, the event raises money for Navy relief and for morale, welfare and recreation activities at the El Toro base and nearby Tustin Marine Corps Air Station.

But while air shows are festive in nature, they are also filled with tension because of the potential danger in many of the performances. Many pilots, sky divers and spectators have been killed at air shows in the past.

One of the worst disasters occurred in West Germany in 1988 when three Italian stunt jets collided, one of them falling into a crowd killing 70 people. Six years before, a CH-47 Chinook helicopter crashed at the Ramstein Air Base air show killing 39 sky divers and five Army helicopter crew members.

Larry Muntz, a federal employee at El Toro who has helped organize 17 air shows, said he believes that the danger, and “the anticipation that something is about to happen,” helps draw the large crowds to the air show.

Muntz was at the air show in 1985 when a World War II era plane plowed into the base chapel and exploded, killing the civilian pilot and his passenger. He was also there three years later when a Marine pilot crashed his F/A-18 jet as 300,000 people, including his wife and mother-in-law, looked on.

Miraculously, Col. Jerry Cadick, then the commanding officer of the fighter jet group at El Toro, survived the crash, but with serious injuries. After a long period of rehabilitation, Cadick retired from the Marine Corps and has his own business developing aviation training devices for the military.

Muntz, 45, who works as a civilian manager at El Toro’s facility management division, said he has watched the El Toro Air Show grow from just more than 100,000 people a day to 550,000 a day last year.

It has rained several times during his 17 years working on the air show, but he said the show has never been canceled.

This year, the performances on Saturday and Sunday will each have 19 different events, starting at 10 a.m. and running until 4 p.m., when the famed Blue Angels conclude their precision flying act. The gates will open at 7 a.m.

On Friday, Jones will get one last chance “to work the cobwebs out,” with a full dress rehearsal. Even then, about 20,000 special guests, including handicapped children and the elderly, will be watching the practice session.

In addition to the tons of food and drink sold each day, said concessions director Gillian Schilling, 25 private novelty vendors will be selling everything from photographic film to Blue Angels T-shirts. They will also be hawking aviation jewelry, toys, model aircraft and suntan lotion.

Nearly 2,000 Marine volunteers will work during the two-day event.

John Jaime, general manager of Park Avenue Catering, headquartered in the city of Orange, said he plans to feed as many as 500,000 during the event. As this year’s food vendor, Park Avenue is prepared to sell as many as 250,000 hot dogs as well as tons of hamburgers, nachos, potato chips and drinks and lemonades.

Schilling said air show officials have purchased the $15,000 insurance premium to cover costs of $600,000 in case the show is canceled because of rain.

But Jones said he doesn’t worry about the weather because there is nothing he can do about it.

“Some things you just can’t control, so why worry about them,” he said. “But I know the weather will be nice.”